On the afternoon of December 28, 2018, the College of Art of Taiyuan University of Technology and the University of Chicago jointly held the academic seminar "Digital Restoration of Tianlongshan Grottoes".
The Digital Restoration project of Tianlongshan is conducted through the cooperation between the College of Art of Taiyuan University of Technology, The East Asian Art Research Center of University of Chicago and the Tianlongshan Heritage Conservation Centre to complete the digital restoration of the grottoes lost overseas. Since 2015, the University of Chicago has completed more than 100 digital reconstructions of overseas modellings, and Taiyuan University of Technology has finished 10 digital scanning of the grottoes. Combined with the overseas modellings, TYUT has realized the digital restoration of the grottoes. The project will begin its national itinerant exhibition in August 2019, with the first exhibition being the Shanxi Museum. Moreover, it was listed as the "Going Global of Chinese Civilization" Project by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of the CPC. It is expected that the world itinerant exhibition will be launched in 2020.
The College of Art held this symposium as they approach the results, so as to discuss such issues as the digital restoration in the early stage of the Tianlongshan Grottoes and the digital exhibition in the later stage. The symposium was presided over by the Dean Zhao Hui of the College of Art, and Professor Lin Weizheng of the University of Chicago. And thirty domestic experts and scholars in digitalization, art history, sculpture and archaeology were invited to participate in the symposium, including Professor Zheng Yan of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Researcher Li Luke of Tsinghua University, Professor Qin Zhen of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts, Professor Jia Zhuofei of Xi'an Jiaotong University, and Researcher Zhang Xiaogang of Dunhuang Academy. At the beginning of the symposium, associate Professor Zhang Xiao from the College of Arts of TYUT, the project leader, reported the progress, which made experts speak highly of the results of digital restoration, and put forward various suggestions on the manifestation and display of digital restoration. In addition, Professor Lin Weizheng proposed his ideas on the details of the restoration, the overall design, the restoration of the historical environment, the restoration results and the exhibition schedule. At the end of the symposium, Dean Zhao Hui made a point from digital restoration and digital display of grottoes, especially from multidisciplinary integration of digital research of Tianlongshan, and summarized all the contents of the symposium.
